Marco's menu is all Whites

Lunching in legal London: Whites

10 April 2012

New Street Square does not sound like an inspiring address. I suppose Avenue Road rises above the dreariness of its name, and I am sure the City of Townsville (Queensland) is really quite interesting. But New Street Square is as dull as it sounds.

Lots of the City of London was restyled by the combined efforts of the Luftwaffe and post-war town planners. One, a ruthless bunch of aggressors bent on destruction and world supremacy; the other, the German airforce.

New Street was new in the 17th century but nowadays its square is a museum of bad buildings. In its centre, where there ought to be a patch of grass and the statue of a national hero, is an office block full of chartered accountants.

Nonetheless, this clearing in the concrete jungle, just to the south of Holborn Circus, has attracted a couple of the big beasts of British cuisine. Until recently Gary Rhodes occupied the restaurant at number one, but now he has been replaced by Marco Pierre White, and City Rhodes has turned into WHITES.

I don't know how often Marco Pierre White goes there himself. He does have a few other restaurants to his name, and he can't be in six places at once. So you can't expect him personally to cook the food, any more than you catch Colonel Sanders serving your Kentucky Fried Chicken or Mr Kipling icing your Bakewell tarts.

However, MPW's picture is in the entrance and his books are on sale at reception. So he is with us in spirit.

This is legal London, a stone's throw from the Inns of Court and the Old Bailey. An appropriate venue to celebrate the end of a series of legal programmes I do on Radio 4 called Unreliable Evidence.

The large dining room was full of groups of mainly male, City and legal types, quietly celebrating the successful conclusion of property deals or the prospect of a new appeal in Jarndyce v Jarndyce. The decor is understated corporate: pale wood and paler paint, recalling the days when New Labour was still new - and still Labour - and Peter Mandelson was in his heaven. A first-class hotel lobby, if you like, decorated by Conran. Window tables have extensive views over Chartered Accountants' Towers. Further back, your view is of the chartered accountants themselves

Whoever is doing the actual cooking, they are not letting Marco Pierre White down.

They serve a fixed, twocourse lunch for £27.50. But there is a 12.5 per cent "discretionary gratuity" and, if you are eating on an expense account, there are plenty of opportunities to spend much more than that. The cheapest wine comes at £3.90 a glass, the dearest, £280 a bottle. There was a very helpful sommelier who, though he looked scarcely older than some of the wines on his list, knew his stuff. He even suggested a relatively inexpensive Argentinian Sauvignon Blanc, Bodega Norton, before taking us on to a rather more powerful St Emilion, 1997 Chateau de Sarpe.

The menu is expressed in that strange mixed grill of French and English that the up-market diner expects, such as velouté of peas and poulet noire au vin jaune, fresh morels and rice.

To start, I had a vinaigrette of asparagus which was perfectly cooked and powerfully flavoured with truffle oil. One of my team did even better with quail's eggs Maintenon. The eggs come on a bed of mushrooms and with an elaborate story of its creation in a French chateau, which the waiter was happy to recount immediately when asked.

There was some sort of problem in bringing all our main courses at the same time (there were five of us) so that one or two were past their absolute best when they eventually reached us. One of my party noticed that a skin was beginning to form on the sauce Béarnaise which came with her fried halibut, and her pommes frites had gone cold.

But my Bressolles of Bresse pigeon with foie gras en chou vert (as it was called in pidgin English) was worth the wait and, I suppose, the £8 supplement. Wrapping it in chou vert may or may not be the best way to serve pigeon, but it is certainly an agreeable way to eat cabbage.

Personally, I think pigs give us so much in the way of bacon, ham, pork, sausages, scratchings and so on, we should let their feet rest in peace. But my producer turns out to be an expert on Marco's trotters and those of Pierre Koffman at Tante Claire. So he was ready to give the pig's trotters here a bit of a kicking if they did not cut the mustard. But, in the event, he declared his to be outstanding.

I try to avoid puddings at lunchtime, but in the spirit of journalistic enquiry I tucked into caramelised apple tart, glace à la vanille. (I suppose they could equally have called it tarte Tatin with vanilla ice cream.) And very good it was, too, though even better was a (hot) pineapple tarte tatin with cracked black pepper. Only a lemon tart failed to get absolutely full marks from my table.